The Courage to Be Disliked
This week's three-part column: Britain's addiction to self-help slop; The coming Green vibe-ocracy; Scientists find career success at the bottom of a bottle. Plus, The Lead Paint Prize goes to...
Eat The Meek
Because there’s never gonna be enough space. So, eat the meek and savour the taste.
Welcome to the inaugural Last Orders. As a man born at least two thousand years too late, I revere—without the faintest compunction—the old school. Why? Because I am, proudly, a curmudgeon: one of those allegedly demented, tweed-addled types with the gall to suggest that what came before us was more cerebral, more meaningful, less chaotic, and infinitely less tedious.
Last Orders is my attempt to restore the great newspaper column to its former glory. Each week, I’ll lob my fountain pen at whatever is careening around your mind and mine. I’ll be right; I’ll be wrong; I will not apologise. I intend to provoke. I refuse to bore you or sedate you with safe opinions or plain prose. The world already has too many HR bores and traffic wardens. We’ve landed in this cultural ditch for one reason: too much flattery and not nearly enough honesty.
So, pour me a treble. And one more thing: I don’t live in an ivory tower. Drop me a message—suggest a topic, lob a grenade, complain. But please, no more marriage proposals. I’m far too busy to take a fifth wife.
The Courage to Be Disliked
British decline and the politics of self-help.
One of Rachel Reeves’ first acts as Britain’s first female chancellor was to pull down all the pictures of men from the grand state room at 11 Downing Street. This, in a country that has elected three female prime ministers in her lifetime. The first—Margaret Thatcher—entered No.10 two months after Reeves was born and ruled until Reeves entered her teens. Thatcher’s photograph, incidentally, no longer hangs on the wall in her old study. Our prime minister, Keir Starmer, tore that down, too. The portrait “unsettled” him.
I wonder what it must be like to live in a serious country and not a kakistocracy—rule by the worst, least qualified, most unscrupulous. Or at least in a country ruled by adults unaffected by their teenage traumas.
An illuminating piece in the FT revealed Reeves—alongside the rump of our talentless political class—as one such character. When a local businessman in Scotland asked about taxes on North Sea oil and gas, Reeves dropped any notion of economics and lectured the chap on gender politics instead: “Talk to me with respect,” fumed the furious Reeves. “I am the Chancellor of the Exchequer.”
Reeves scored a victory, in her mind at least, for that peculiar cohort which celebrates its genitalia like the Mayans worshipped the sun.
The Chancellor of the Exchequer, to furnish her proper title to which she invests such esteem, traffics in the curious dialect of modern identity politics: that bipolar tongue in which one is simultaneously fragile and fierce. Upon appointment as the first female chancellor, Reeves claimed without a sense of scale to have “smashed the glass ceiling.” That’s despite three other women occupying the office above hers—the proper job—before her. The glass, it seems, is visible only to Reeves, and the selectively oppressed.
This is the vocabulary of our therapeutic age: the language of empowerment welded to the language of victimhood. On Mondays, Reeves is the deserving heir to “all the great women who came before us.” On Tuesdays, she is the helpless victim of misogyny, sexism, and a cornucopia of isms and ilities—mysterious forces which shrink or expand according to one’s performance.
If one slogan could define our age, it would be: It is not my fault.
Walk into any bookshop and you’ll find the same ethos lining the shelves. Ranks upon ranks of pastel-coloured optimism, each volume promising to ‘unlock your inner genius’ or ‘unleash the beast.’ The cover features a gawping face. The title, a forced marriage between a verb and an abstract noun, the more grammatically offensive the better: Be Your Brilliance. These books are hokum. These books are what Marx called the opiate of the masses: selling a world in which there are no limits, biological or environmental. The only limitation, it appears, is a lack of imagination. Self-help books are lottery tickets for the credulous.
Reeves governs as if she has inhaled the lot.
The British economy is wheezing; under her care, it has progressed from whooping cough to phlegm-flecked emphysema. Wages are stagnant, investment is down, inflation is up; energy bills are monstrous, and red tape is calcifying. These are concrete realities. Reeves answers them with abstractions and an almost spiritual belief in intention over outcome.
Whenever reality intrudes, she supplies mythology. She has been “underestimated” all her life. That’s a strange claim from a graduate of both Oxford and the LSE, and who now runs the sixth largest economy on earth. If anything, the gap is reversed: the results of her work fall far short of the respect she demands. But that is symptomatic of our age: your work doesn’t reflect your competence, your bank balance doesn’t reflect your financial literacy, your waistline doesn’t reflect your grasp of calorie expenditure.
That is the eternal appeal of the self-help philosophy: nothing is final, reality is optional, poor results don’t reflect upon you. If anyone suggests otherwise, they’re guilty of misogyny or racism or sexism or ageism or thin privilege or insert imaginary bugbear.
The Budget revealed the endgame. Taxes went up, growth went down, and Labour’s promise not to tax “working people” dissolved via the oldest ruse in Westminster: frozen thresholds that drag millions into higher bands. It is a tax rise without the decency to admit it.
Meanwhile, a record exodus of young Britons allows Labour to boast—without irony—that immigration is finally falling. Some 700,000 have fled the country, tired of buying another round and never seeing one return their way. Meanwhile, the real pressures—crushing energy costs, strangling bureaucracy, a housing crisis—remain untouched. This was a budget for Labour MPs, who are effectively staging a sit-in protest at the Houses of Parliament. An election held today would evict all but a handful from public life.
Reeves might have benefited from reading The Courage to Be Disliked, the Japanese bestseller rooted in Alfred Adler’s neglected genius. Adler’s core idea is disarmingly simple: separate your tasks from the tasks of others. Do what is yours to do; abandon the corrosive need for approval. The modern cult of grievance—addled by self-help voodoo—collapses under such clarity.
Had Reeves adopted Adler’s teachings, she might be free—free from the need to be acknowledged for her genitalia; free from hallucinated misogyny; free to observe cause and effect. Free to see with clear eyes the real-world results of her policies without invoking the penurious conspiracy of unseen spirits.
Chance would be a fine thing. Such a fundamental shift would require a virtue that no self-help tome would dare suggest: the courage to see things as they are and not as one would like them to be.
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